Foreign policy wonks and international relations scholars have summer daydreams just like everyone else.  So I can only imagine what my colleagues thought when they read about the latest TV special in Pyongyang:

After a failed missile launching, aborted diplomacy with Washington, and continuing international pressure over the country’s nuclear program, North Korea’s untested young leader has tried once again to take a dramatic step with his isolated, impoverished nation, this time with a bit of unapproved help from Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh.

North Korean state-run television on Monday showed footage of costumed versions of Tigger, Minnie Mouse and other Disney characters prancing in front of the leader Kim Jong-un, and an entourage of clapping generals.

The footage also showed Mr. Kim in a black Mao suit watching as Mickey Mouse conducted a group of young women playing violins in skimpy black dresses. At times, scenes from the animated Disney movies “Dumbo” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” were projected on a multipanel screen behind the entertainers; an article in the state-run press said unnamed foreign songs were on the bill.

The appearance of the characters from the United States, North Korea’s mortal enemy, was remarkable fare on tightly controlled North Korean television, which usually shows more somber and overtly political programs. A Disney spokeswoman, Zenia Mucha, had no comment Monday beyond a statement: “This was not licensed or authorized by the Walt Disney Company.”....

The performance was not the first time the Kim dynasty’s fate had been entwined with Disney. In 2001, the current leader’s older brother, Kim Jong-nam, was apparently banished from the line of succession after being detained by the Japanese authorities while trying to enter Japan on a Dominican Republic passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

If you look at Sky News' YouTube clip of the show, it does seem like there's a whole Disney Princess theme going on as well: 

The BBC reports that this production "seems to point to an easing of North Korea's paranoia about what it calls spiritual pollution from the West."  Or... a Kim obsession with Disney.  Take your pick. 

In full summer daydream mode, I think this is an outstanding opportunity to pursue unconventional statecraft towards Pyongyang.  Clearly, there's something about Disney that renders the Kim family weak at the knees.  Clearly, the best way to exploit this vulnerability is to have the State Department commission Disney to make a film containing Zoolander-like subliminal images that target the Kim family in particular to subvert their own regime.  We know (sorta) that Disney has done this before.  We know that even someone as wide-eyed as Katy Perry can be weaponized.  Why shouln't the United States exploit its soft power and deploy the Disney Gambit against the Kims? 

Because it's the summer and I'm lazy In the interest of participatory policymaking,  I hereby encourage readers to submit their own plots and subliminal messaged ideas in the comment stream.  Let's make this manipulation of Kim Jong Un a reality! 

Buried within James Risen's interesting New York Times front-pager about the easing of Iran tensions is an even more interesting story about the deep weirdness that is going on within Israel's national security establishment on Iran: 

At the same time in Israel, the conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been rocked by a series of public comments from current and former Israeli military and intelligence officials questioning the wisdom of attacking Iran.

The latest comments came from Yuval Diskin, the former chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who on Friday said Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should not be trusted to determine policy on Iran. He said the judgments of both men have been clouded by “messianic feelings.” Mr. Diskin, who was chief of Shin Bet until last year, said an attack against Iran might cause it to speed up its nuclear program.

Just days before, Israel’s army chief of staff suggested in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the the Iranian threat was not quite as imminent as Mr. Netanyahu has portrayed it. In his comments, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz suggested that he agreed with the intelligence assessments of the United States that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile,” General Gantz told Haaretz. He suggested that the crisis may not come to a head this year. But he said, “Clearly, the more the Iranians progress, the worse the situation is.”

Last month, Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, said he did not advocate a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program anytime soon. In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Dagan said the Iranian government was “a very rational one,” and that Iranian officials were “considering all the implications of their actions.”

As someone who thought the Iran rhetoric coming from Jerusalem was decidedly overheated, I nevertheless have more mixed feelings about these developments than, say, Peter Beinart.  What's disturbing is that even though Israel's actual opposition party is evincing many of the same sentiments as the former military officers quoted above, they are not the ones moving the policy debate -- it's the ex-military/intel guys. 

That's a problem.  As much as candidates for higher office like to talk about "consulting the commanders on the ground" and the like, big decisions about national security policy should be the province of elected leaders.  Civilians need to be in control of these decisions -- the moment that elected leaders give up this control, then the voters have forfeited the most vital decisions of a republic.  This is why, in the United States, one of the rare sources of continuing bipartisan agreement is that when military commanders voice their policy opinions to the press in a way that contradicts the President, they need to be canned. 

Now, recently retired military and intelligence officials are in a slightly different category, but there's still a danger here.  I respect that these ;people should have a voice, particularly if they feel their country is on the precipice of a policy disaster -- but should their voice be louder than that of the main opposition party?  I don't think so, and it's a sign that there's a problem with Israeli democracy if that's the case.  I don't think this is entirely the fault of ex-IDF and Shin Bet leaders, mind you -- Netanyahu and Barak are part of the problem as well.  Still, at least the latter people won elections and must go back to the voters again. 

Developing... in a  very problematic manner. 

Let's face it, far more Americans associate the name "Bo" more with Barack Obama's dog than with Bo Xilai, the now-disgraced former Communist Party chief of Chongqing (my generation of Americans will, of course, forever associate Bo with this).  That might be about to change, however, because Bo is at the center of the most serious post-Tiananmen political scandal in China.  

To recap:  Bo was pushing hard for an appointment to the nine-person Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Politburo -- the most powerful decision-making body in China.  He might very well have received it too, based on the combination of his "princeling" ties, his populist, Maoist-style campaigns and the flock of high party officials visiting Chongqing to see how he was doing it. 

Two months ago,  however, Bo's police chief Wang Lijun showed up at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu seeking asylum.  He left the consulate, but the reverberations haven't stopped.  First Bo disappeared from public view, then his "Jackie Kennedyesque" wife Gu Kailai was charged with the murder of British citizen Neil Haywood, and then Bo was formally put under investigation and stripped of all his party posts. 

So, what the hell happened?  Slowly, details are starting to trickle out about Bo's methods in Chongqing and exactly what led to his downfall.  In order, I'd suggest reading the following: 

1)  On Bo's methods in Chingqing, see this gripping Financial Times expose from March, followed by Malcolm Moore's dispatch in the Daily Telegraph. 

2)  See Reuters' Chris Buckley on what exactly triggered Wang's flight to Chengdu -- and then read this Cheng Li interview in NBR that throws some cold water on the stories coming out now.  . 

3)  On how U.S. officials handled Wang's request for asylum, check out the New York Times' Steven Lee Myers and Mark Landler's excellent reconstruction of events in Chengdu. 

4)  On what This All Means for China, read Minxin Pei, Max Fisher, Cheng Li, and Jonathan Fenby. 

5)  Finally, read John Garnault's excellent FP Long Read on whether a Bo-style scandal is about to break out in the People's Liberation Army. 

OK, now you know everything I know.  So what do I know about Bo?  Not much, except for four things: 

A)  For the past decade there was a lot of talk about how China had managed to routinize the authoritarian selection process.  The transfer of power from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao seemed seamless.  Well, say what you will about what's happening now, but it ain't seamless.

B)  I tend to agree with Minxin Pei (and disagree with Cheng Li) that Bo's arrest is not an example of the system working, but rather the system coming veeeerrrrry close to a catastrophic failure.  The fact China's official apparatus has clammed up after Bo's arrest is a clear sign that there's still a lot of infighting going on.  The notion that this will therefore lead to a real reform/anti-corruption trend strikes me as based on hope more than reality (though see this previous post of mine as a hedge). 

C)  Despite the official no-comments, the fact that Chinese officials are now leaking like a seive to Western reporters is interesting, and suggests the ways in which a purge in this decade will not resemble pre-Tiananmen purges.  It's not that there will be more rumors and conspiracy theories now than thirty years ago -- it's that all this stuff will not be on the Internet -- which will force the CCP to respond more than it would like.

D)  Based on how things played out, the U.S. State Department deserves a tip of the cap for how it handled Wang's sojourn to Chengdu.  The fact that there were no press leaks until yesterday is good -- anything the U.S. government says publicly about this episode needlessly embarrasses and angers the Chinese government.  That said, given the current attitudes in Beijing about the United States, even the Times story is going to raise some hackles.  Indeed, given the current strife inside China, it would be easy to envision Beijing making life difficult for the United States elsewhere as a way of using nationalism to paper over elite divisions.

Am I missing anthing?  Oh, I'm missing plenty, and I strongly urge China-watchers to proffer their comments! 

One of the drawbacks of being a foreign policy blogger is that it becomes very awkward to avoid discussing international relations events that make the front page for consecutive days.  I am therefore duty-bound to comment on Kim Jong Il's death, Kim Jong Un's ascension to leadership, and what it means for North Korea. 

Except I have no friggin' clue what will happen. 

I am in good company on this total lack of knowledge.  I'm bemused by all the U.S. officials anonymously commenting on what Kim Jong Un is like, given that our intelligence on this country is so awesome that Washington didn't know his father was dead until 50 hours after he died, and then only because the North Koreans announced it on television.  To be fair, however, it's not like the South Koreans knew either, and some reports I've seen suggest the Chinese were in the dark as well. 

Despite the near total lack of information outside of North Korea about North Korea, the International Brotherhood of Foreign Policy Pundits require I provide at least two predictions per post.  So, here's my first prediction, courtesy of Mr. T: 

What we do know about the triumvirate of Kim-Jong-Il selected leaders guiding Kim Jong Un into power does not bode well for the North Korean economy.  The only bright spot for the DPRK's economy in recent years was a modest step towards private economic activity.  The fact that one of them "published articles about the need for the government to curtail market-oriented activity" does not bode well for the per capita income of your average North Korean. 

My second prediction is that Kim Jong Un will hold power for longer than any Western analyst expects him to hold power.  Most of the pundit chatter has been about the Kim the Youngest's lack of gravitas and the asbsence of sufficient time to groom him as the successor to Kim Jong Il.  As I'm hearing this, I keep thinking of Hua Guofeng, Mao's successor.  It's an imperfect analogy, but Hua was a relative unknown plucked from obscurity by Mao only a few years before his death.  In the end he was outmaneuvered by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, but even Hua managed to stay in power for a few years before that happened, putting down an attempted coup by Mao's wife Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four. 

To use more game-theoretic language, I'm not sure there is a first-mover advantage to any ambitious North Korean challenging Kim the Youngest.  Because of that, and because the entire DPRK elite likely fears internal division when concerned about natiional survival, the tyranny of the status quo will likely persist for longer than anyone realizes.  Which, unfortunately, in this case, happens to be actual tyranny. 

Am I missing anything? 

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Reuters have stories about Germany's newly announced plan to denuclearize by 2022.  See if you can find the common pattern.  Here's the WSJ: 

Germany's move—marking a contrast with the U.S. and other countries that have largely stuck to plans to continue pursuing nuclear power—is a U-turn from a contentious plan that Ms. Merkel engineered just last fall that would have extended the lifetimes of some of Germany's reactors into the 2030s, more than a decade longer than previously scheduled. Ms. Merkel's latest move is effectively a return to an agreement to phase out nuclear power approved in 2002 by a center-left Social Democrat-Green coalition....

In few countries is nuclear energy the hot-button issue it is in Germany, where polls show some 70% of the populace opposes it, the legacy of a broad-based antinuclear movement that harks back to the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Since the Fukushima accident, antinuclear protests have taken place across the country.

Ms. Merkel's change in course, though, hasn't produced the desired political effect. Conservative allies have been frustrated by her turn away from a cherished policy victory, and nuclear opponents have seen the move as opportunistic. Those perceptions contributed to several stinging regional election losses for the Christian Democratic Union this spring, and have led to a surge in clout for the opposition Green Party.

And now the NYT:

For Mrs. Merkel, the embrace of clean energy represents a transformation based on the politics of the ballot box. Just last year, her center-right coalition forced through an unpopular plan to extend the life of nuclear power plants, with the last to close in 2036. That action inflamed public opinion but the Fukushima disaster politicized it. The nuclear crisis is widely believed to have caused Mrs. Merkel’s party to lose control of the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the first time in 58 years, in a March election that became a referendum on energy policy.

By Monday, Mrs. Merkel said the country must “not let go the chance” to end its dependence on nuclear power.

And, finally, Reuters: 

The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe "bridge" to renewable energy and extending their lifespan to pushing a nuclear exit strategy that rivals the ambitions of the Social Democrats and Greens.

Merkel had her atomic epiphany after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March, announcing a moratorium on nuclear power and launching an urgent overhaul of German energy policy, resulting in the exit strategy announced on Monday.

Her change of heart, however genuine as it may be, coincides with a string of disastrous election results for her Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Free Democrat (FDP) allies that have been partly blamed on her unpopular pro-nuclear policy so far.

With the FDP losing popularity almost as fast as the Greens gain it, and the Greens unseating the CDU in their heartland of Baden-Wuerttemberg in March as well as outpolling them for the first time in Germany in Bremen this month, Merkel has upgraded the nuclear moratorium to a rush for the exit.

Watching Merkel's performance during the myriad euro crises of the past two years, I'm beginning o detect a decision-making algorithm at work.  Let's call it The Merkel Algorithm.  It consists of the following steps:

1)  A problem festers;

2)  Dither and do nothing;

3)  Public opinion polls drop;

4)  Let things fester some more;

5)  Lose an electioon somewhere;

6)  Announce new policy that reverses prior position

7)  Lose even more political support. 

Merkel appears to have brilliantly executed this strategy on both the eurozone and nuclear power.  In all seriousness, what I don't understand is the long periods of dithering and festering.  I get that politicians will sometimes be wrong-footed on policy shocks.  Merkel, however, really does seem to wait until the worst, most cravenly political moment to do something.  Why? 

Your humble blogger hereby calls on all Germany-watchers to offer either an explanation or a more nuanced take on the Merkel Algorithm -- because your humble blogger is good and truly flummoxed. 

Comment away on what's going to happen in Egypt after Hosni Mubarak's resignation third unsatisfying speech. 

Ironically, I think if Mubarak had said what he just said on the night of his first speech, things would be far more stable.  As it currently stands, however, it's painful to hear Hosni Mubarak referring to himself in the third person trying to give up as little as possible, even as his various power bases erode and more social strata join in the opposition. 

I think Mubarak agreed to transfer some powers to his Vice President, and he promised some constitutional chanes.  To be honest, however, that wasn't the primary theme of the speech, and I don't think this is remote close to ending the crisis. 

Developing....

Your humble blogger has, in the past, live-blogged or live-tweeted the State of the Union address. After reading the National Journal's draft of the speech, I've decided that the mindless applause will convert a decent 30-minute speech into an interminable 75-minute talkathonso I'm gonna watch Mystery Men instead to pass.

Looking over the draft, however, I see that the Obama administration has really taken this competitiveness theme to heart. More than any State of the Union I've seen before, President Obama raises the examples of other countries doing things better than the United States as an impetus for the U.S. to do more. Consider:

The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there's an internet connection.

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They're investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world's largest private solar research facility, and the world's fastest computer....

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation's Sputnik moment....

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us - as citizens, and as parents - are willing to do what's necessary to give every child a chance to succeed....

Our infrastructure used to be the best - but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation's infrastructure, they gave us a "D."

We have to do better.

I'm curious to see how this will play out. On the one hand, the administration is obviously using this kind of "we're falling behind other countries!" shtick as a way to build public support for investments in education and infrastructure. In the same speech he talks about falling behind South Korea, for example, he embraces the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

At the same time, I have two big concerns with this approach. First, there's the risk of rhetorical blowback, in which everyone freaks out and reacts in a hysterical manner.

Second, and more important, the percentage of the speech devoted to microeconomic "competitiveness" issues vastly exceeds the amount devoted to long-term macroeconomic policy. If the federal government really wants to create a better climate for innovation, it needs to send a credible signal that steps are being taken to deal with long-term budgetary problems. That section of the speech was, er, less solid.

[What about the foreign policy sections?!--ed. Meh. Nothing bad -- just nothing of substance either. One could argue that the biggest foreign policy innovation of the SOTU is the administration's decision to use globalization as the political crowbar to pry infrastructure spending investments from Congress.]

Feel free to comment away on what you would like to see in the speech.

I was very curious to come to Dubai. I kept hearing people describe it and then stumble on a lack of proper adjectives. In 2008 I wrote about how it was an exemplar entrepôt economy that others in the region would copy in order to diversify away from oil. The financial crisis burst the property bubble, however, and Dubai had to turn to much wealthier Abu Dhabi for a sovereign bailout and rename the Burj Dubai to the Burj Khalifa. Since then, the big picture has improved somewhat. What about the picture on the ground, however? Is Dubai still a model for the rest of the Gulf?

First, the picture on the ground. Ever since I arrived, I've been trying to figure out the best way to explain Dubai. Here's what I've come up with: If Stanley Kubrick had an unlimited budget and was making a movie about Las Vegas glitz, Dubai would be his set.

What do I mean by this? Well, like Kubrick's films, Dubai is underpopulated in an odd way, and the lack of people gives the place a very odd feel. There are shiny hi-tech malls, stores, and skyscrapers galore, but there isn't much else. From a citywide perspective, looking from the top of the Burj Khalifa, one sees all the new skyscrapers, a few blocks of the old part of town, and then … desert.

Even in the shiny parts of the city, there just aren't enough people to fill up the space. Everywhere I looked, there were way too many workers per customer. The Dubai Mall, for example, is truly massive, with every Western brand name that still exists and a few (Rainforest Cafe, Benetton) that I thought had gone under. There was an entire wing of racy lingerie stores. The mall wasn't empty by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was it really all that full. I don't honestly know if there's sufficient demand to keep these stores afloat, however.

Lest one think this is criticism, it isn't. I'm rooting for Dubai to succeed. If enough people come to the place, I think the Kubrickian oddness will wear off (though, not, perhaps, in the Armani Hotel. The hotel literature informs me that "every detail has been personally chosen by Armani to reflect his passion for stylish comfort and functionality." To your humble blogger, it seems like Mr. Armani has expended considerable sums of money to bring back the tacky wood finish of late 70s American suburbia, combined with the creeping isolation of Kubrick's The Shining). Any country that embraces the service sector with the same vengeance of North America is fine by me.

Can Dubai be replicated? Here I'm more skeptical than in 2008. I suspect Dubai will survive and thrive. Every region needs a world-class airport and service-sector hub, and Dubai has become that hub for this region. I'm not sure the market here is big enough to support similar hubs in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, and Kuwait, however.

I'd be very curious to hear what other Dubai visitors and residents think in the comments.

Hey, remember the rest of the world?

The Financial Times' Ben Hall and James Blitz  report on a surprising degree of defense cooperation between London and Paris:

David Cameron, British prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, hailed their summit in London on Tuesday as an unprecedented move towards closer integration between Europe's pre-eminent military powers brought on by budgetary austerity but also a closer alignment of the two countries' foreign policies.

They signed two treaties: one covering the sharing of technology used to maintain nuclear warheads and another on initiatives about conventional forces.

Mr. Sarkozy said the agreement to share a new research facility in France for the testing of nuclear warheads was testament to a "level of confidence between our two nations unequalled in history".

Until now, France and Britain have closely guarded the secrets of their nuclear deterrents, regarding them as the bedrock of their independence.

Mr Cameron said the two treaties would commit the French and British armed forces to working "more closely than ever before".

Paris and London also agreed to set up an "integrated carrier strike group", allowing each to fly combat aircraft from the other’s carrier once Britain has an operational ship equipped with its U.S.-built Joint Strike Fighter jets, by the beginning of the next decade. In the next 10 years, the French and British navies would centre co-operation on the Charles de Gaulle, France’s only carrier.

What's interesting about this is not the military effects -- in the end, this is about trying to do more with less -- but the political ones. In a world of austerity, there is some logic in close allies working together to eliminate redundant platforms and/or other fixed costs that could be pooled across countries. Furthermore, this kind of defense integration, once started, would strike me as very hard to reverse. 

This year has seen a lot of people predicting the end of the EU and NATO as Europe struggles with its economic misfortune. I wonder, however, if hard times are actually having the opposite effect of forcing European and NATO countries closer together. This might not be popular, but it's the only viable policy option in some instances.

One of my favorite passages of fiction comes from Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

As someone in transition from being a young structural IR theorist to an old one, I've now seen enough to recognize when certain patterns begin to recur. For example, I've now read enough articles about the North Korea's Worker Party Congress to know the following:

1) This was a Very Big Deal

2) Kim Jong Il's family got some promotions

3) It is impossible to write an article about North Korea without quoting either Andrei Lankov or Victor Cha.

And after reading all of this, I can now state with confidence the following: no one knows exactly what the f*** is going to happen in North Korea once Kim Jong Il dies. There are plausible stories that can be spun any which way. But no one really knows.

I hereby encourage all young political scientists to get excited about this Party Congress and convince me that something very important and of profound significance was revealed in the past 48 hours. 

Halfway through my Israel vist, I've heard from a lot of high-ranking officials, strategists and academics about how they see Israel's security situation.  It would be safe to say that there are a few paradoxes. 

On the one hand, there are ways in which Israel's security situation has been better over the past 18 months than it has been for a long time. The rocket attack in Ashkelon was striking because it was the first one since Operation Cast Lead.  Rocket fire from Gaza went from 20-30 a day to one every other week or so.  Hamas is running Gaza, but Israel has enough reconnaissance equipment overhead and along the border to, as one IDF soldier put it, "know enough to know the brand of olive oil they put on their hummus."

Similarly, in the north, there has been no rocket fire since the 2006 Lebanon war. As for the West Bank, suicide terrorism has disappeared from Israel proper, and the Israelis sound confident that terrorist  networks are pretty much nonexistent.  The Israeli officials believe that the Palestinian Authority under Salid Fayyam Salam Fayyad are slowly and steadily developing administrative competencies, which help to ease the likelihood of Hamas developing a foothold. 

Why are things so good right now?  The Israelis believe it's because Hezbollah and Hamas now control territory, which means that they can be deterred.  As one official put it, both Hezbollah and Hamas have transformed themselves from strong terrorist networks to weak armies.  Israel fought bitterly against these outcomes, but they're comfortable with the status quo. 

Actually, most Israelis are too comfortable with the status quo.  The bad news is that Israeli security experts also recognize that all of the long-term trends are working against them.  As military forces, both Hamas and Hezbollah are only getting stronger, with rockets that can hit further into Israel proper.  Iran is developing its nuclear capabilities and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.  The demographics are such that, unless Israel lets go of the West Bank very soon, Jews will become a distinct minority.  The window for a viable two-state solution is closing fast. 

So, what should be done?  Israelis don't have a great answer to this question, beyond "let the status quo continue."  They think containment can work in Gaza, and that engagement can work in the West Bank.  The wishful thinking that regime change will solve Israel's problem runs strong and deep within Israeli security circles (coincidentally, this is the only issue on which Israelis sound more optimistic than their America counterparts).  Mostly, however, Israeli officials are concerned that the attractiveness of the status quo will lull the population into inaction.  At a time when Israel could exploit its temporary advantages into the best deal possible, there isn't a lot of forward progress on any of Israel's security issues.  And normal Israeli citizens just want to go to the beach - which creates a problem that I'll discuss in my next post.

One of the glib jokes I like to make is that one country in the world needs to maintain a communist, centrally-planned economic structure.  This would serve as a public service warning to future generations of policymakers.   Some of them would inevitably romanticize prior communist efforts as noble in their aspirations and unfairly maligned by the capitalist writers of history.  At that point, you get on a plane and fly them to the Last Remaining Communist Country in the World to show them just how bad real life can be. 

My nominee for this country was always North Korea.  China's economy doesn't really fit Stalinist dicta anymore; neither does Vietnam.  And keeping Cuba as a communist country is just a fabulous waste of culture and resources.  No, North Korea seemed to be the ideal museum of blinkered economic thinking. 

After reading Sharon LaFraniere's heartbreaking front-page story in the New York Times about North Korea today, however, such jokes ring a little hollow: 

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.

Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-Il.

What seems missing — for now, at least — is social instability. Widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation and growing political uncertainty as Mr. Kim seeks to install his third son as his successor have not hardened into noticeable resistance against the government. At least two of those interviewed in China hewed to the official propaganda line that North Korea was a victim of die-hard enemies, its impoverishment a Western plot, its survival threatened by the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

South Korea’s charge that North Korea sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March was just part of the plot, the party official’s wife said.

“That’s why we have weapons to protect ourselves,” she said while visiting relatives in northern China — and earning spare cash as a waitress. “Our enemies are trying to hit us from all sides, and that’s why we lack electricity and good infrastructure. North Korea must keep its doors locked.”  (emphasis added)

The emphasized part is what gets me.  The party official's wife -- presumably, one of the DPRK's elite -- has to work as a waitress to earn extra income. 

None of this is news.  Marcus Noland wrote about this here at FP.com back in March.  For a more detailed analysis, see his Peterson Institute for International Economics' brief with Stephan Haggard.  The highlights from that brief: 

Respondents portray a judicial and penal system characterized by high rates of arbitrary detention and release. Horrific abuses are characteristic not only of the camps for political prisoners, but are found at all levels of the penal system. In the survey of more than 1,300 refugees conducted in China between August 2004 and September 2005, nearly 10 percent reported incarceration in political and correctional detention facilities. Among this group, 90 percent reported witnessing forced starvation, 60 percent deaths due to beating or torture, and 27 percent executions. These findings are broadly confirmed by a second survey of 300 refugees conducted in South Korea in November 2008, which also included more detailed questions about initial arrest and detention, the types of facilities in which respondents were held, and the conditions they witnessed while incarcerated.

The emerging portrait of the North Korean penal system suggests a vast machine that processes large numbers of people engaged in illicit activities for relatively short periods, but which exposes them to terrible abuses while incarcerated. This pattern serves to effectively intimidate; our surveys reveal an atomized society in which barriers to collective action are high and overt political opposition minimal. However, repression has not served to eliminate market-oriented activity, in part because of the continuing poor economic performance of the regime. Rather, our surveys suggest a changing political economy in which corrupt officials extract bribes from those in the market, exploiting their ability to limit entanglement with a brutal penal system.

There is another simple reason why a social revolution is unlikely to topple the North Korean regime -- starving people might lack the energy to do anything other than search for something to eat. 

Developing... in the most depressing manner possible. 

Three Five quick thoughts on the Moscow subway bombing:

1)  Who gets the blame?  As Clifford Levy points out in the NYT, "Mr. Putin built his reputation in part on his success at suppressing terrorism, so the attacks could be considered a challenge to his stature."  On the other hand, one could see Putin trying to shift the blame onto Russian president Dmitri Medvedev or Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov as a way to thwart future rivals.  On the other hand, a lot of Russians are already unhappy with the government, and diversionary tactics might not work this time. 

2)  Is there an international dimension?  Russia's neighbors in the Caucasus and Central Asia, along with the United States and China, are praying right now that the suicide bombers were entirely domestic in origin and execution.  If there was an international link, one could easily envision nightmare scenarios about Russia's international response.

3)  How screwed is the North Caucasus?  They were already pretty screwed because of the Putin administration's attempts to crack down on secessionist groups in the region.  I seriously doubt that this attack is going to cause Russian leaders to rethink their strategy.  If anything, a doubling-down approach is the likely outcome.   

4)  Hey, Europe might be relevant again!!  The New York Times' Steve Erlanger reported on the latest Brussels Forum meeting, at which European security and foreign policy officials kept saying, "we're relevant!!"  Given that the highest-ranking U.S. attendee was an Assistant Secretary of State, I'm pretty sure that U.S. officials didn't think that dog would hunt ex ante.  A Russia ready to lash out, however, is guaranteed to force more transatlantic consultations. 

5)  Obama's counter-terrorism policies don't look so bad in comparison.  This is unfair -- the process matters just as much as the outcome, and it might be that the Obama administration is just luckier than the Medvedev/Putin administration.  Still, the comparison will be made (though Michelle Malkin attempts to link the attacks to Obama's weaknesses on counterterrorism). 

Developing....

Over in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich's apparent narrow victory over the Yulia Tymoshenko has had the anticipated effect inside the U.S. foreign policy community -- there's been an exercise in massive navel-gazing.  I'm therefore going to make things worse by engaging in meta-navel gazing (usually something I only consider doing with you-know-who).

Let's start with the Century Foundation's Jeffrey Laurenti: 

Yanukovych's election yesterday, narrowly edging out prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in the run-off, spotlights the folly of Washington conservatives who pressed single-mindedly to lock Ukraine (and Georgia) into the Western military alliance during the Bush administration.  They discounted deep ambivalence among Ukrainians themselves and sought to override overt opposition from NATO's leading members in western Europe. 

Like insects trapped in Baltic amber since dinosaur days, American conservatives remained frozen in a comfortingly simple cold-war view of the world:  Russia is incorrigibly suspect and must relentlessly be hemmed in by American power. 

That sounds like a cue.... yes, let's click over to The American Interest's Walter Russell Mead: 

The apparent victory of Viktor Yanukovych in yesterday’s Ukrainian presidential election is yet another setback to the idea that the world is rapidly becoming a more democratic place....

In hindsight, the choice that we made to extend NATO farther east in gradual steps might have been a mistake.  Russia hates NATO expansion and always has.  To some Russians it looks like the inexorable approach of a hostile alliance that endangers the motherland; to others it is a constant humiliating reminder of Russian weakness and the west’s arrogant presumption after 1989.  The expansion was annoying when it was limited to the former Warsaw Pact Soviet allies; it was maddening and infuriating when it extended to territories that were once part of the USSR like the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.  The prospect of a new wave of expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine, and push right up to the Russian frontier, was a worst case scenario nightmare for Russia.

If we were going to expand NATO eastward, we probably should have done it all at once, making agreements in principle and establishing basic interim security treaties with those countries whose actual entry might have to be delayed.  What we’ve done instead is like pulling a bandage off tiny bit by bit, endlessly prolonging the agony.  We should have ripped the whole thing off twenty years ago.  (We should have also thought much more seriously than we ever have about the likelihood that expanding NATO probably ultimately entailed bringing the Russians in as the only way to stabilize the security situation across Europe.)  Now the combination of Russian opposition (which, among other things, reduces European enthusiasm for expansion), geopolitical instability (do we want to get sucked into a new Russia-Georgian war?) and the general decline of US interest in Europe make a strong new push for expansion unlikely — even if the Yanukovych government wanted to join NATO.

So here we are: stuck with a security fault line in Europe, while the Russians will continue to fish where there aren’t any signs.

Both of these posts suggests way too much focus on the immediate implications of the election -- a president more favorably disposed towards Moscow. 

I think this is one time when the mainstream media actually brings greater value-added to the table.   The New York Times' Clifford Levy makes an intriguing suggestion in this news analysis -- that the process of Ukraine's election is more significant than Yanukovich's victory: 

[T]he election won by the candidate, Viktor F. Yanukovich, was highly competitive, unpredictable and relatively fair — just the kind of major contest that has not been held in Russia since Mr. Putin, the prime minister, consolidated power.

On Monday, for example, European election monitors praised the election that was held Sunday, calling it an “impressive display” of democracy. Ukraine's election, in other words, did not follow the Kremlin blueprint and, if anything, seemed to highlight the flaws in the system in Russia. As such, it presented a kind of alternative model for the former Soviet Union....

[Analysts said] that while the public ousted the Orange government, it did not want to do away with all aspects of the Orange democracy. They said a backlash would occur if Mr. Yanukovich tried to crack down.

The Ukrainian model may have particular resonance now with recent rumblings of discontent in Russia.

Late last month, antigovernment demonstrations in Kaliningrad, a region in western Russia physically separate from the rest of the country, drew thousands of people and seemed to catch the Kremlin off guard. Some protesters chanted for Mr. Putin’s resignation, complaining about higher taxes and an economy weakened by the financial crisis.

And last week, a prominent politician from what had been perceived as a puppet opposition party unexpectedly turned on the Kremlin and lashed out at Mr. Putin’s domestic policies. “Is opposition and criticism dishonest?” said the politician, Sergey Mironov. “In a civilized society, this is the duty and goal of the opposition.”

It is highly unlikely that Russia will soon have Ukrainian-style openness. The question now is, what will be the long-term impact across the former Soviet Union if Ukraine can follow its successful election with a relatively peaceful transition to a Yanukovich administration?

That's far from guaranteed, if Tymoshenko's latest actions are any indication.  And the past is not necessarily encouraging -- Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko won free and fair elections the one time they were held in Belarus, back in 1994. 

Still, this is an outcome that should have democracy activists pretty pleased with themselves -- and members of the foreign policy community less obsessed with the international relations version of horse race politics.